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“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” Obama said.

Obama noted the hypocrisy of individual users receiving long sentences while those who wrote the laws “have probably done the same thing.”

As for the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state, Obama said, “It’s important for it to go forward.”

“It’s important for society not to have a situation, in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished,” the president said.

The president did say that those who claim legalization will solve a slew of other problems are “overstating the case,” and that the new laws in Colorado and Washington state will be a challenge and could lead to tougher debates on harder drugs down the road.

“You do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, ‘Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka,’ are we open to that? If somebody says, ‘We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth,’ are we OK with that?” the president said.